PASSING
She was in Scotland when she saw a man in a restaurant who reminded her of him. Tall, broad, toned, shaved head. Sexy in that way that appeared not to involve any effort. The sight of the stranger pulled something awake in her. Longing, longing for the physical atmosphere of him in particular, for what had once existed between them, swept through her. She knew he could not be reduced to appearance alone, yet she also acknowledged his physical presence as something undeniably powerful. It had always felt that he altered the space around him. She imagined him climbing the stairs to her apartment, coming through the door and looking at her with that particular look he had, lifting her up and kissing her.
She resisted the idea that someone resembling him could awaken something she thought she had settled. Almost as a test of that assumption she reached out to him to tell him about his doppelgänger. More than a year of unanswered emails led her to believe he would not write back. But an email did come back. Why? she wondered, but did not ask. Their conversation unfolded in the strange rhythm they had always shared, absurdity layered with sincerity, sexy flirtation layered with philosophy. They joked about being vigilant of the dangers of roaming doppelgängers and Scottishness, enjoying the wit, the strange performanceBut underneath the playfulness there was already something else moving for her; identity, perception, the fragility of her emotional resolution. She wondered what she’d done to form his silence so long ago and what now had brought forth his words.
Then the conversation drifted deeper, as it often did with them, toward self-awareness and aging and memory. She spoke about endless discovery, about how perhaps forgetting things as one grew older might make life more interesting rather than less. He reframed it as “a march toward forgetfulness.” She softened it immediately into “a gentle meandering stroll.” He leaned toward abstraction and pronouncement. She kept returning things to lived texture, to humanity, to movement rather than doctrine. He strode through life purposefully, and she liked to stop to look at things growing in the path, it’s not that she didn’t achieve things, no one could accuse her of that. But she liked to feel. She liked to observe. And then spend time bringing the feeling and the thoughts about the feeling together in contemplation of meaning. She wanted to grow outwardly and inwardly. It seemed to her that he wanted to blast himself to somewhere predetermined, not without thought exactly, but maybe without much sense of wonder.
There was honesty in the way she spoke about desire with him. Not performance. Sometimes she was deliberately coy, more as a test than anything, just to see how he’d respond. More often than not her coyness would be met with sophomoric humor, almost like he had to put a wall of laughter between them to stop any feelings he may have from being revealed. But even then she enjoyed him, thought she maybe understood him, forgave him the bravado that she believed covered some gentle awkwardness.
A week later she told him that her father was dying. Not metaphorically. Not eventually. Actively dying. In pain. In decline. She told him that her father was in the last months of his life and that she had been thinking deeply about how people moved toward death. What struck her most was not mortality itself but suffering. Her father still possessed grace, dignity, immense inner power, yet his body was betraying him piece by piece. She could accept death intellectually, even if it frightened her, but the pain accompanying dying brought her to her knees. It made her insides clench with horror. She didn’t explain to him, because she didn’t know how, that at night she lay in bed sobbing, “No, please no,” trying to force from her mind the prospect of her father having his foot amputated.
From there the conversation deepened into impermanence, love, memory, and perception. She described recently discovering mold on her wedding album at her cabin in Vermont and how that small physical destruction unexpectedly broke her open. Because the album contained so many images of people she loved who were now gone.
Kenny smiles next to Wendy, his cheeky grin bursting from the page, big gaps between his teeth that she knew he hated but were somehow so attractive in his face, all him. As she hears him say “Oh Ali” as he shakes his head at something shocking she has just said, that he loves and is amazed by at the same time. His laughter and excitement whenever there was fire involved, there was always fire involved. Always the edge of danger mingled with sweet laughter.
Kenny wanting kids and saying to her “But Ali, what if I drop them? I don’t know anything about children” Going to the hospital the day after his daughter Sophia was born and her so comfortably cradled in the safety of his arms and how he never looked like he didn’t know what to do ever again. And then one day, when he was forty two, Sophia was six and A was four, he cut a whole bunch of trees down, took Bruin for a walk and collapsed from a cardiac arrest. Us all taking turns to sit next to him for four days and then the unplugging of the machines and watching him leave, even though we knew he’d already gone. The stillness in him, complete and utter. As his mother stood shaking as she held his hand and Wendy lay her head on his chest as a sob wrenched from her.
Jen, her long ringlet hair, standing beside the coffee machine laughing with her wide mouth open. Even though it’s a photograph it looks like she’s moving, always moving, always her mouth open, shovelling spoonfuls of chickpeas or ice cream or anything else into it. Such an oral person. The two of them mountain biking, Jen not having been on a bike since childhood, barreling down the hill behind her, grabbing the front brake too hard and flying over the handlebars, over her shoulder, onto the road. Chin and arm and blood. The shock of it as she picked herself up and started running uphill, and her right behind her yelling, “Jen! Jen!” Remembering the men sitting outside their ramshackle house watching Jen wobble into the yard, blood everywhere, immediately grabbing the cooler, tossing aside their beers, packing ice around her arm and face. Telling her, “No, you look great. Really, great. You want a beer?” Jen with her jaw wired shut for five weeks. Not a good thing for someone so oral. Starving for sensation as much as calories, she would pull off one of the elastic bands just to pop in a chickpea. Jen’s mother dying from ovarian cancer and then, the year before she died, Jen being diagnosed with the same thing. Six years of chemo and struggle and the day she and Eitan drove five hours to sit with her in hospice, Jen looking somewhere between still here and already gone, asking for a cracker. “You and your fucking crackers, Jen.” Jen laughing through the pain and then not able to laugh anymore, coughing as dry cracker burst and dribbled from her cracked lips.
Her father dancing the twist at her wedding. Joy caught in physical form, the music flowing around them as he moved in and out. His hand out towards her as she spins. And how that photograph made her feel her fathers hands on hers down through the ages, his laughter, his play. Being taught how to box at the back door…hands up, hands up, protect your chin, look at my eyes, look at my eyes, and then his balled fist gently bobbing her on the chin…I told you look at my eyes you can always see when someone's about to hit you from their eyes. And tears had rolled down her face onto the photograph, blurring the image of him dancing the twist.
And the others, her grandmother, John’s father, aunts and even the people not at the wedding that came along later and also are gone. And the death of the marriage itself. The loss of hope and love that’s bound in that album. She’d wiped the pages and laid the album in the sunshine to dry the mold. Hoping to save something. She tells him that she knows that the images were not truly trapped inside paper. They lived inside her mind. The album mattered for sure, she didn’t want it to mold away, but memory mattered more. And that, the distinction between what was there and what was memory, what made memory, became increasingly important as her father declined because she understood that people disappeared physically long before they might leave psychologically. Maybe they never leave.
He answered her with theories about perception and stored images and the instability of memory. She pushed back immediately. Schools of thought, she said, were ultimately limited. Real intelligence came from examining one’s own experience honestly while remaining aware that all conclusions were provisional. Human perception itself rested on always shifting information somewhere between interpretation and reality. Anyone who believed otherwise was a fool.
Even while talking philosophically she kept returning to lived experience. To ambiguity. To the instability of actual life. He spoke in pronouncements sometimes, little distilled truths delivered from above, while she remained inside the mess of feeling and observation and contradiction. Eventually the conversation arrived at connection itself. Was meaningful connection even possible if reality was only interpretation and choice? She observed that most people moved through relationships assuming alignment until suddenly discovering they had misunderstood one another completely. Some people questioned and clarified. Others simply continued the performance.
Hermitage. That is the answer, he jokingly declared.
It is certainly an answer. But to what question? She countered, not really in the mood to leave the depth she was struggling within, against, pushing through to surface something. Herself perhaps. Love maybe. The meaning of it all probably.
She asked if he had any questions he’d like answers to, his reply came back sharply “None”
Gosh. Does that make connecting with others in a meaningful way challenging?
It sure does but it really enhances the ability of one connecting with themselves and thus arguably the universe.
To her that response felt so sad for so many reasons, for the loss of the man he’d been before who she knew had not believed that, for the loss of potential for connection that mattered.
And she wanted to scream and explain that while they circled abstraction, her real life was collapsing into medical brutality. And she tried saying that, she told him she was heading home to New Zealand because her father had reached the point where doctors were discussing whether to let his foot rot rather than attempt an operation they believed might kill him. The horror of that reality stripped away abstraction entirely. This was no longer philosophy. This was flesh. Pain. Fear. Bureaucracy. Declining kidneys and failing valves and impossible decisions. Facing death in all directions. She explained that to him and his response enraged her, “Most difficult decisions do have an element of blow built right on in.”
She accepted death. What she could not accept was prolonged suffering, especially in a man she saw as robust and courageous. The details became increasingly domestic and unbearable: the hospital bed waiting at home, the nurse dressing his foot, hospice discussions, medications that barely touched the pain, her mother distraught but still somehow strong. The entire machinery of dying entering her life, her parents ordinary life. And his comment, so not about death, about a “level of blow” in all decisions, the imminent death of a parent is not a fucking level of blow. It’s pain wrought in all her cells, it’s pain rolling from her fathers face and her mothers distressed calls.
And through all of it she kept trying to hold everyone together. Watching both parents distressed while simultaneously attempting to solve what could not be solved. Offering comfort and care, packaging her emotions away in order to do that.